When browsing comments, some images do not show when clicked on. Others do not show when clicked on but do show when “preview image” is selected such as the link in this comment.
There are two separate issues at play. Let me try to summarize.
First, a lot of these issues have popped up because it looks like Lemmy has started to encode images as AVIF files. AVIF is currently not well supported by the Android OS. Which is causing these image load issues. These issues can be bucketed into two categories:
(1) Android 11 and below do not come with an AVIF decoder so these devices cannot decode AVIF images unless an AVIF decoder is shipped with the app. AVIF decoders are rather large so adding one will double the app size. I also tested a standalone AVIF decoder and even that had bugs and trouble displaying some images.
(2) Even on the latest Android OS, AVIF support isn’t total. This means that certain AVIFs cannot be decoded by the OS decoder if they use certain features.
Due to how widespread this issue is it looks like I will be forced to ship an AVIF decoder with the app. This will mean the app will grow greatly in size but at this time I don’t see another way around it. In my opinion, this is an issue on the server side but while I can kick and scream about it, it will not fix the problem with the app.
I’m leaning towards shipping an AVIF decoder with the app and if the server later fixes the problem I can always remove the AVIF decoder from the app.
Update: In the end I did not ship an AVIF decoder with the app because the open source Android AVIF decoders had bugs and some caused crashes. So with the additional file size and the bugs, it doesn’t seem worthwhile to ship a decoder with the app for the time being.
Not sure if AVIF is too bleeding edge or just the encoders used to encode them is using too many bleeding edge features, but for now it looks like Android is going to have a hard time with AVIF images.
Didn’t have to search too hard to come across all this context. Thanks for filling us in and thanks for the effort. Will be sure to keep an eye out.
I’ve been seeing the same thing more frequently as well. It doesn’t seem limited to a particular community or instance or user.
I’ve been experiencing a similar issue, though mine seems to be more consistent. Images from feddit.org will not load in-app, while working fine in my browser. Could be related, maybe?
